The most comprehensive study
of liblogs (and, I suspect, the most comprehensive study of blogs in any
specific field) is now available and discounted through the end of ALA
Midwinter 2011. You can order it now at www.lulu.com/content/9829119.

The Liblog Landscape
2007-2010 looks at every
English-language liblog (blog by a self-identified library/archives/museum
person, or blog about library/archives/museum issues, that isn't an official
blog offering an institution's or groups views) that had a presence on the open
web in early summer 2010 and at least one post before June 1, 2010.

That’s 1,304 liblogs from more than two dozen countries.

Even though this book does not include profiles for
individual liblogs (unlike The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008, now out of
print, and But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, still
available), it covers so much ground and with so much analysis of the recent
history of English-language liblogs that the book is still a fairly thick
paperback: 241 print pages (including 4 pages of front matter and a 20-page
index of blogs).

The book looks at key metrics for March-May 2007, 2008, 2009
and 2010: Primarily number of posts, average length per post and average
comments per post, as well as changes in those metrics and patterns of metrics,
but also total length and total comments.

The book also discusses overall lifespan, number of posts
and posts per month for most of the blogs—and other secondary metrics such as
software, country in which the blog was (apparently) written, when blogs began
and how current the most recent post was (as of May 31, 2010).

On sale now

The 241-page 6×9″
(trade) paperback, on 60# cream book paper, costs $35.00, or you can buy the
PDF download for $22.50. From now through the end of ALA Midwinter 2011, both versions
have an early-bird 25% discount for a final price of $26.25 (plus shipping and
handling) paperback, $16.88 (no shipping or handling) PDF.

But wait! There’s more…

I didn’t include individual liblog profiles this time around
because the book would have been far too thick (at three profiles per page,
that’s another 430+ pages!) and because the profiles are too much work for the
limited audience. But the profiles are also interesting. So here’s an offer:

For each copy sold, I’ll post four individual blog profiles on Walt
at Random…doing them in absolute alphabetic order.

“Absolute alphabetic order” is the sort order Excel provides
including initial articles, punctuation and all.

So if the book sells 326 copies, I’ll post all the
profiles…sooner or later.

Part publishing

Portions of the book have
appeared or will appear in Cites & Insights, but Chapter 1 and the
index will not appear in C&I. Chapter 2 (in draft form) appeared in
the December 2010 C&I. Chapter 3 appears in this issue. Additional
chapters may appear in future issues, depending on a number of factors,
including the continued health of C&I itself.

The Way We Blog

A few Walt at Random readers may remember that I used The
Way We Blog as a working title for this project at one point.

If there seems to be serious interest in the ongoing history
of liblogs, at the moment a very big “if,” that title and approach may be used
for a five-year version adding 2011 data. “Serious interest” involves some people
buying the book.

Cites & Insights 10 in Book Form

The paperback version of Cites & Insights 10: 2010 is
now available for purchase through Lulu at www.lulu.com/content/9687359.
The 419-page 8.5 × 11" paperback includes all twelve issues, the
indices and an overall table of contents.

All print volumes of C&I are priced at $50
paperback, $40 PDF, but there’s a 20% discount on print volumes of C&I
through the end of ALA Midwinter 2011, so the paperback currently costs $40 and
the PDF currently costs $32.

I produce these at least in part because it’s the easiest
and cheapest way to have a high-quality bound volume for my own use. I think
they’d be great for library school libraries and possibly collections on
experimental publishing, but if I got even five sales for a given volume, I’d
be astonished–and pleased.

The cover is based on a photograph taken by Linda A. Driver
off Moorea in 2001.

Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large, Volume 11, Number 1, Whole # 136,
ISSN 1534-0937, a journal of libraries, policy, technology and media, is
written and produced by Walt Crawford.

All
original material in this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-nc/1.0 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way,
Stanford, California 94305, USA.